


Beacons

by foojules



Category: The Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff Vandermeer
Genre: F/M, I tried to keep it in character, Missing Scene, not just making my dollies kiss, sorry for the romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 15:44:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12436059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foojules/pseuds/foojules
Summary: Control dreams of his leviathans; Ghost Bird wakes him.





	Beacons

**Author's Note:**

> I was intrigued by the dynamic of Ghost Bird and Control’s relationship, the shifting power balance and the ways in which they see each other, and I wanted to take it a bit further than it goes in the books. Takes place the night before the final descent into the tower in _Acceptance._

GHOST BIRD

Ghost Bird woke in the dark to Control dreaming. He flailed as if he were drowning, moaned and muttered loudly enough to wake Grace if he kept it up. Ghost Bird tightened her arms around Control, tried to quiet him without waking him, but he gave a sharp inhale, his body going still and watchful. She kept her breathing deep and even. At first to modulate his, then to help her on her own journey back toward sleep.

A hiss of consonants twined itself through her drifting thoughts, a whisper with hardly any breath behind it. After a while she recognized it as Control’s name. His real name, repeated over and over, and she could not escape the sense that he was giving it up, offering it to Area X. This alarmed her so much that she opened her eyes. The pine branches overhead feathered across the spread of stars, the familiar lie of Area X’s night sky. Ghost Bird reached for Control’s hand, which was folded around the carving he always carried in his pocket, and wrapped her hand around both. She placed her lips on his as she had on the beach when they came through, and for a similar reason; only now she was trying to keep in what needed to stay in, rather than draw it out.

He took a shaky breath, like someone in the middle of sobbing, then let it out in a huff of what felt like surprise. His arms came around her with a strength that Ghost Bird had not thought he still had. She suspected it came from whatever was inside him, changing him, but the shine of his eyes in the dark was human. Human, too, the hunger she felt from him, the hunger he awoke in her. She hadn’t expected that. She felt almost sorry she hadn’t allowed this before, though there had been the bad taste left by the döppelganger of the biologist’s husband, the delicate balance between Ghost Bird and Control and Grace. An alliance would have upset that, introduced complications they didn’t need.

But this, this most elemental of human connections, this was something that Ghost Bird had not realized until now needed to be experienced firsthand. She had dismissed it, because she saw no equivalence between limited options and desperation. Maybe that was right, and all she had needed was a reason. It had begun as something she was doing for Control, a comfort, but when it was over and she lay in his arms—as opposed to him lying in hers—she found herself more grateful to him than she would have thought.

 “Ghost Bird, do you love me?” he whispered. The question an echo from the biologist's life, and just as irrelevant to the situation. In the morning she would go down into the tower, with no notion of what she truly faced there or whether she would return. But she remembered myths read in high school, the preamble to the heroes going into battle: they sought one last moment of softness, of attachment, before they descended into that final violence. And she did love Control, in a way. He was a constant in her life, someone who’d been with her almost the whole time she’d lived in this body. Even when he wasn’t present.

_Ghost Bird, do you love me?_ She’d cared enough to try and save him. She still did.

A beacon could be refuge or peril, it could guide a ship to safety or lure it to smash itself on the rocks. She couldn’t be sure which this was. She didn’t even know where they were headed. She could be reckless with her physical safety but was cautious emotionally; that was one thing she shared with the biologist. She shifted out of Control’s arms, positioned herself at his back, curled protectively around him.

“We should get some sleep,” she said.


End file.
